It is animals' natural instinct to hide any signs of weakness, illness and disease, and animals do this very well. In nature, weak animals are an easy prey for predators, or an easy target for their peers, competing over food resources, leadership or mates. Household pets and companion animals are not different from wild animals in this respect: they also hide signs of weakness, illness and disease. For this reason, signs of disease in animals frequently go unnoticed for some time, until the disease progresses to more advanced stages and signs of disease become more severe and observable. Early detection of diseases always leads to the best chance of recovery, as stated by veterinarian doctors.
Presently available approaches for companion animal health monitoring do not include continuous automated quantitative methods and means but rather rely on qualitative observations by animal owners and caretakers and periodic or intermittent veterinarian exams. One of the quantitative means for companion animal health monitoring is periodically weighing on weighing scales and recording the result and comparing with the result of previous weighings such as weighing at home or at a veterinarian office.
Such manual approaches are cumbersome and do not provide timely access to animal health characteristics, the weighing takes place mostly irregularly, not sufficiently frequent and lacks consistency in weighing and tracking changes in body weight on a periodic basis such as daily. Also, manual processes are prone to inaccuracies, incompleteness and loss of data; furthermore, keeping the animal steady on a weighing scale during the weighing is challenging because the animal, which has been forced onto the weighing scale, is naturally trying to move around, or even step off or jump off of the weighing scale.